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Did Cavemen Play Darts?
Did Cavemen Play Darts?
by Dr John V. Day
 Did cavemen ever play
darts? They did according to the satirical writer Martin Amis. In his novel
LONDON FIELDS, Amis writes about a spoof handbook on darts which traces the
history of darts "back to caveman times. The top caveman would be the man who
brought back the meat every time, employing his darts skills."
Fact is Martin, you may
have been joking, but you were bang on target. Darts -- or at least the
practice of aiming missiles -- has an ancestry that goes back millions of years,
back to the time when the earliest humans lived on the African savannah and
hunted by throwing rocks at antelopes, pigs and gazelles.
But let us begin the story
even further back, when our ancestors were still apes. We know that it's rare
for chimps and other primates to throw with any accuracy. But chimps will throw
stones wildly when hunting pigs, for instance, trying to scare and to isolate
the young ones, and probably our distant ancestors hunted like this, millions of
years ago. Throwing missiles wildly was an important first step in humans
evolving to *aim* them -- a complex business for the brain and the arm -- to
stun or kill animals, or to drive them over cliffs.
Our ancestors have been
making tools in stone for more than two million years, and the ball-shaped stone
tools found in east Africa that date to this period may be among the first stone
missiles. Hunting became more important to our ancestors over time, especially
for the early human called "Homo erectus", which appeared over one million years
ago in east Africa and had evolved arm and hand bones that certainly look
adapted for throwing missiles. Living on the African savannah, *Homo erectus*
was forced to hunt a lot in order to survive, when other animals were eating its
plant foods.
If you ate meat, the
African savannah offered a walking larder that had far more food per square mile
and far more calories than if you stuck to roots, berries and fruits. (Nuts are
full of protein, it's true, but they are usually seasonal.)
Continued Page 2.............
© Patrick Chaplin 2007
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